Wikipedia Warning Label

In the last few years Wikipedia has become one of the most used reference sources in the world. This has its good and bad sides. On many mathematical and scientific topics the articles are both informative and well written. The same is true with somewhat less frequency on non-controversial topics in history. It also does a job of replacing the old style desktop reference as a ready source of dates, place names, and other boilerplate information.

Beyond that things get problematic quickly. The so-called neutral point of view (NPOV) is a joke. The site is eaten up with leftist political correctness, particularly of the multicultural sort. Articles are rife with the sort of false equivalences and spurious claimed antecedents and precedents that make up so much of the multiculturalists’ game. Stories of fully documented and wide-scale war crimes by communist or non-western nations are juxtaposed with anecdotal or single-source claims of mistreatment of prisoners by Great Britain and the United States, giving the uninformed reader a sense that the actions of all parties were pretty much the same. Major scientific accomplishments of westerners are linked to tenuous, strained or fanciful claims of allegedly somewhat similar observations by someone sometime in Africa, Asia, or the Moslem world. False claims by known propagandists are given respectful treatment as legitimate alternatives to factual accounts.

Bias permeates much of the site, but it reaches the point of complete silliness in articles about controversies that are both current, politically significant, and crucial to the left’s present dogmas. An obvious example is global warming where NPOV is nowhere in sight and undiluted religious fervor and straight up evangelizing are the order of the day. The same Wikipedia that offers space uncritically to fringe left wing crackpot notions on other topics in the spirit of presenting all views neutrally has nothing but scorn for the skeptics and blessed assurance for the believers on this one.

So what should people and particularly parents do? I recommend first buying a good encyclopedia, preferably a set old enough to be both cheap, written at above a third grade reading level, and generally really somewhat objective in point of view. When our daughter was in school we used a Britannica from the 1950’s that we picked up for fifty bucks. There are plenty of such deals around, and they are fine. One doesn’t consult an encyclopedia for recent history or science anyway, and Faraday and Henry II have not changed in the last half century. Beyond that, parents should make their children aware that Wikipedia, while useful, is generally both biased and superficial and that they should always keep that in mind. Kids are going to have to learn how to smell the propaganda anyway, and this is as good a place as any to get those lessons.